Revelations in Quantum Sublimation
by Grand Phoenix
Summary: Why yes, hell does exist. It always has. And it's right here, its demonic cries ringing in your ears. Pointman-centric. ONE-SHOT.


**Disclaimer:** All characters and locations belong to Monolith.

_A/N: This is one of those games that I've heard of but never played, but after watching a full walkthrough on YouTube I was compelled to type this. It can take place anywhere in the game. And the person who quoted about hell is one Dr. Frederick Leboyer, a French obstetrician best known for popularizing gentle birthing techniques (thinks about FEAR 2 and LOLs)._

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**Revelations in Quantum Sublimation**

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"_Yes, hell exists. It is not a fairy tale. One indeed burns there. This hell is not at the end of life. It is here. At the beginning. Hell is what the infant must experience before he gets to us."_

As he's mowing down Replica Forces from behind the glass divider separating the second floor and metal-piercing death, he wonders with incredulous detachment where he's heard it. Certainly not from a book, he hardly ever reads except if it's mission statements from SFOD-D or FEAR or those monthly gun magazines he finds poorly shelved at Central Command. Certainly not a movie, either, save those instructional videos the military play for their new recruits (- and he, the Pointman, is not a rookie by any chance, per se; he's a God Among Men -)

But regardless of where and how he knows of this, there's one particular facet he's certainly aware of:

Hell _DOES_ exist. It _DOES_ burn. It's a feasting ground for philanders and sloths and demons with TEETH on hands and eyes and poison-laced fingers rotted black and yellow and eating itself through flesh and marrow. It's here, it's now, and it's the first feeling infants experience when they pulled from the cesspool of creation and oblivion. (And he can hear her, that woman; he can hear her with an ear-ringing clarity, her shouts and cries and pleas as her cervix rips open like the Gate to Hades and her womb engorged in an inferno so excruciating, so agonizing, so horrific, so damn _BLINDING_.)

Hell exists, and he's unable to understand why he has to be the one imbued with these peculiar gifts: to heighten his reflexes and slow down time – all with a single thought. Yes, it gives him a great advantage to snipe the brutes (between the eyes, the base of the spine, riddling their bodies with lots of pretty red holes in their ash-grey armor) when they least expect it, but it's not enough to redeem the disadvantages supplemented. You see, when he uses his gifts and carves a path swathed in grey matter, bits of bone, and an ungodly amount of blood, he can _hear them_, the demons sleeping in the skins of men who are not men but soulless vessels for the damned to take. And when they inhabit those bodies and wake up with a set of eyes and hands and feet and face unlike their own that is when they become _human_. They talk human, they breathe human, they smell human, they act human.

But they're not human, no they're not. Human they may look, but they are never human. With his gift he can extract the demons from their core, pumping slug after slug after slug into their soft, wet, pink innards, ripe and fat as a mosquito's belly and bursting from their backs a spider's web of guts and acidic fluid. And oh, what a tangled web the forces of the universe are wont to weave! When that cursed silver bullet pierces their mortal coil they SCREAM – low and guttural and reverberating and utterly unholy – and it seizes his heart in a cold, clawed grasp, freezes the blood rushing and pounding and roaring ( - LIKE A PRIDE OF LIONS SINKING THEIR MIGHTY PAWS INTO A MAN WHO CAN'T DEFEND HIMSELF AS HE SCREAMS HIS THROAT HOARSE AND THEY TEAR HIM _BIT BY BIT BY OH SO PRECIOUS BIT_ -) in his ears, robs the breath in his lungs.

Whoever conjured and arrived at the conclusion that hell was as real as Planet X was a fucking genius, because hell is earth and earth is hell and _THEY'RE EVERYWHERE THEY'RE EVERYWHERE GET OUT OF MY HEAD LEAVE ME ALONE MAKE IT STOP_ and—

He doesn't realize he's clutching his head and screaming until Douglas Holiday's static-filled voice breaks through the helmet's uplink and tells him to calm down. The Pointman stops and, as if seeing the world for the first time, digests the absolute carnage that was once the first floor lobby. The Replica Forces lay in various contorted positions, slumped against a crimsoned wall or on the floor as a pile of intestinal mush. The ceiling, most peculiarly, is painted sanguine from corner to corner.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath.

What a mess, he thinks to himself absently, quaking hands falling away to his sides.

What. A. Mess.

And he didn't even have to use the gun.


End file.
